She

Haggard, H. Rider

ISBN 10: 0140052976 / ISBN 13: 9780140052978

Published by Penguin, 1982

About this Item

Most items will be dispatched the same or the next working day. A copy that has been read but remains in clean condition. All of the pages are intact and the cover is intact and the spine may show signs of wear. The book may have minor markings which are not specifically mentioned.

Seller Inventory # rev2305518107

Bibliographic Details

• Title: She
• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication Date: 1982
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0140052976
• ISBN 13: 9780140052978
• Binding: paperback
• Condition: Good
• Weight: 160 grams

About this title

Synopsis

A courageous late-nineteenth-century Englishman sets out to avenge his ancestor's lover who was murdered by an elusive, compelling, and eternal white African queen

Review

Ayesha is She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, a 2,000-year-old queen who rules a fabled lost city deep in a maze of African caverns. She has the occult wisdom of Isis, the eternal youth and beauty of Aphrodite, and the violent appetite of a lamia. Like A. Conan Doyle's Lost World, She is one of those magnificent Victorian yarns about an expedition to a far-off locale shadowed by magic, mystery, and death.

Tim Stout writes, in Horror: 100 Best Books, "As the plot takes hold one has the fancy that [Ayesha] had always existed, in some dark dimension of the imagination, and that [H. Rider] Haggard was the fortunate author to whom she chose to reveal herself." Haggard did, in fact, write this book in a six-week burst of feverish inspiration: "It came faster than my poor aching hand could set it down," he later said.

This edition of the 1887 classic features an introductory essay by literary critic Regina Barreca, who likens Ayesha to Flaubert's Madame Bovary or Tolstoy's Anna Karenina--"literally fantastic female figures who must be stopped before they love again."